Apple has been snapping up smaller companies as of late, and the latest is video discovery and content recommendation start-up Matcha.tv. News of the acquisition was first reported by VentureBeat on Monday, said to be priced between $1 million to $1.5 million.

Before shutting down in May, Matcha.tv was a personal content recommendation site and mobile app that helped users find movies and TV shows to cater to their personal preference. At its prime, it fell into one of the top 15 apps in the entertainment category of iTunes, letting users find what was available to watch via their cable TV provider and streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon. Using social media to keep up with what your friends were watching, it was a pretty cool service.

Apple, in its secretive ways, hasn't provided a reason as to why it purchased Matcha.tv, except "that it buys smaller technology companies from time to time". AllThingsD says the deal has been confirmed to them by Apple. We've reached out to the company in hopes of learning more about the purchase.

In February 2012 Apple made a similar acquisition for iTunes. It bought App Store search and discovery app Chomp. Perhaps most telling, Chomp CEO Keighran joined iTunes Marketing, while CTO Edwards became a Senior iTunes Engineer. Is it possible the smaller acquisition of Matcha.tv could produce the same sort-of acqui-hire results?